An Argentine bishop considered close to Pope Francis and who was an adviser for the management of Vatican property was sentenced Friday to four and a half years in prison for sexual assaults committed when he was bishop of Oran (northwest of the ‘Argentina).
The court in Oran, 1,700 km from Buenos Aires, ordered the imprisonment of Mgr Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta, 57, who had been on trial for two weeks. He had been appointed bishop of this diocese by his Argentine compatriot Pope Francis in 2013. He resigned in 2017.
The prelate denied the accusations against him, and his defenders indicated that they would certainly appeal.
The court found the clergyman guilty of “continuous simple sexual assaults aggravated by the fact that they were committed by a minister of religion” against seminarians. He ordered his “immediate detention” and his registration in the genetic register of perpetrators of sexual offenses.
The court followed the prosecution’s submissions, while the defense pleaded acquittal.
Pornographic photos
The trial, which was held behind closed doors, followed complaints filed in 2018 by at least two seminarians, who had mentioned in particular “romantic proposals” and “requests for “massages”” made insistently by Mr.gr Zanchetta.
The ecclesiastic affirmed for his part that he had always had “a good and healthy relationship with all the seminarians”, sometimes intimate exchanges with them on their private life or their problems, but normal within the framework of his office, and without “any connotation sexual”.
He also assured that at the time of the canonical investigation into the facts, “three priests had told him that the complaint against him was a matter of revenge”. A “conspiracy” thesis rejected on Friday by prosecutor Soledad Filtrin Cuezzo.
Witnesses heard at the trial spoke of the bishop’s embraces or embraces “which lasted longer than normal”, of “preferences” for certain seminarians to whom he gave gifts, and for some of them late evenings spent at the bishop, according to the court records of the judicial authority of the province of Salta.
The vicar general of the diocese of Oran, Gabriel Acevedo, for his part said that the alert had been given to the hierarchy of Mr.gr Zanchetta and went back to the Vatican after the discovery of “pornographic photos in which the bishop appeared with young people”.
“The victims were believed”
In 2019, after the opening of the preliminary investigation for sexual assault, the Vatican explained that Mgr Zanchetta had resigned in 2017 due to “very tense relations with the priests of the diocese”.
At the time of his resignation, there were accusations of authoritarianism against the bishop, “but no accusation of sexual assault,” the Vatican said in a statement at the time.
At the end of 2017, Mgr Zanchetta had been appointed assessor at the Apostolic See Patrimony Administration (APSA), which manages the Vatican’s real estate assets. At the time of this appointment, “no accusation of sexual assault had emerged,” the Vatican also said.
As soon as the investigation was opened in 2019, Rome had indicated that Mgr Zanchetta would “refrain from working” at APSA.
Estela Mari, a relative of a victim, welcomed the outcome of the verdict that “justice has been done, that the victims have been believed, and that the truth has come to light”. Now, “we must help these young people, because they have suffered a psychological trauma, they are not well, morally and also economically”.
The victims’ association of the American network SNAP hopes that this condemnation “encourages other survivors, in Argentina and throughout Latin America, to come forward” and “encourages other governments around the world to take a closer look at the how the Roman Catholic Church functions in their territory”.
Javier Belda, one of the canonical defenders of Mgr Zanchetta, justified a probable appeal, because he considers “that there is no proof, that the facts are not proven, but that a series of contradictions between the witnesses reinforces the idea that certain people have brought seminarians to interpret things” a posteriori.